Pain
Introduction Pain is 'an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage'. In other words, it is a subjective phenomenon . Hence, if a patient finds that he is in pain, then he is in pain. The function of acute pain is to alert the body to a potential threat , prevent the body from further damage (e.g. by moving away from the trigger), and learn to avoid similar harm in the future. NOTE: Older people are often reluctant to disclose pain for fear of being a burden or developing a drug dependence. Pain Assessment The most commonly used pain scales include Numerical rating scale : rates pain on a number scale, e.g. from 0 (no pain) to 10 (worst imaginable pain). Visual analogue scale : 10-cm-long lines labelled with an extreme at each end, usually "no pain at all" and "worst pain imaginable". Wong-Baker FACES Pain Rating Scale : uses pictures of faces with different expressions...